What is Dymola?

What is Systems Modeling and Simulation?

Systems modeling and simulation is a field of study which aims to understand component interactions and holistic system behaviors.
Systems modeling and simulation is applied across a broad range of disciplines, including engineering, computer science, physics, chemistry, biology, economics, and medicine.

Systems engineering, software engineering, and computational platform advancements have made it possible to model and simulate complex systems in real-time – even hundreds of times faster than real-time – or to perform optimization, prediction, and what-if studies in almost real-time. This is vitally advantageous to commercial manufacturers aiming to improve product quality and time to market.

What is Dymola?

Dymola (Dynamic Modeling Laboratory) is a user interface and Modelica language compiler owned and developed by Dassault Systèmes. Dymola enables the user to write, compile and simulate Modelica based models.

Dymola uses the Modelica modeling language to define models and provides the user with open access to the language. This means that you are free to create your own model libraries or extend from the existing Modelica libraries to accelerate development times, reduce maintenance efforts and improve the level of reuse across projects.

A portfolio of multi-domain libraries covering the mechanical, electrical, control, thermal, pneumatic, hydraulic, powertrain, thermodynamics, vehicle dynamics, air-conditioning domains can be coupled together to form a single complete model of the system. Dymola is used by companies operating in many industries including automotive, aerospace, architecture, motorsport, energy, and high-tech.

Dymola supports the FMI Standard for the import and export of models. It supports FMI 1.0 and 2.0 for both model exchange and co-simulation. In addition, Dymola supports real-time simulation on a wide range of HiL platforms.

What is Modelica?

Modelica is a modeling language developed and maintained by the Modelica Association. The Modelica Association includes members from both industry and academia. See modelica.org for more information.

Modelica is an acausal modeling language where physical components are described by relationships rather than procedural code (the latter method is highly prescriptive and is typical of a programming language).

When using Modelica, the user does not have to re-arrange model equations to suit the system boundary conditions or the application of the system or model. This makes the models extremely versatile and allows extensive model reuse for many applications. It also enables user friendly model inversion.

Furthermore, the execution code is generated and optimized for us at compilation through an automated process called Symbolic Manipulation allowing ever more detail to be modeled with minimal increases in CPU time.

Key Features and Benefits of Dymola and Modelica

By using drag-and-drop composition at higher levels and ordinary differential equations and algebraic equations at the lowest level, Dymola’s features enable you to model and simulate any physical part.

• Modelica Language Support
  Dymola fully supports the Modelica modeling language, which is an open standard developed by the Modelica Association. Modelica is an open source, component-orientated physical modeling language.
• FMI Import and Export
  Import and export FMU’s that are compliant with FMI 1.0, FMI 2.0 and both model exchange and co-simulation aspects of the standard. A Simulink Coder target is also provided to compile Simulink models into FMU’s.
• Component-orientated
  Modelica libraries contain objects that represent physical components such as valves, resistors, gears. Models are created graphically by drag and drop to build a schematic of the system.
• Modelica Libraries
  An extensive range of Modelica application libraries are available covering many different engineering domains and industries. These libraries cover domains such as thermo-fluids, heat transfer, electrical and mechanics as well as applications like vehicle dynamics, engines and buildings.
• Real-time Simulation
  Dymola supports real-time simulation with many HiL (hard-in-the-loop) platforms including dSpace, Concurrent, xPC, and many others that support Simulink or FMI. Complete multibody vehicle dynamics models can be run in real-time.
• Symbolic Manipulation
  Dymola uses symbolic manipulation to give it outstanding performance for solving differential algebraic equations (DAE). These routines also handle algebraic loops and reduced degrees-of-freedom caused by constraints.

In Our Experience…

Claytex, a TECHNIA Company, are users and distributors of Dymola. We’ve been contributing for many years, helping to define the software development requirements, liaising with Dassault Systèmes and Dymola users.

We also help define requirements, developing and using Modelica application libraries in our day-to-day activities on customer projects within the road, off-road, and motorsports sectors including CAV (Connected Autonomous Vehicles).